Opinion: How internet rumors, Republican in-fighting and an election year are threatening a bipartisan border bill

I’ve been around politics long enough now (more than 40 years) to have learned how to tame the beast of cynicism. In my experience, most politicians share an inner desire to improve things and help people, even if they occasionally act nutty or mean for political reasons, and even if I happen to disagree with their philosophies.

But what’s happening right now in Washington over attempts to craft a border bill is causing the beast to strain at its leash.

It’s not just me.

One of the nation’s leading Republican voices, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, seems to be turning into a cynic before our eyes.

Described by Politico as “an even-keeled conservative,” he was appointed by minority leader Mitch McConnell as the lead Republican negotiator in talks with Democrats over an immigration bill that would take a step toward solving the mess at the southern border.

For about 20 years now, my colleagues on the opinion page and I have been urging just such a thing. Fourteen years ago, Utah’s political, business, academic and religious leaders joined in writing the “Utah Compact on Immigration,” which the Deseret News correctly said “was celebrated as a visionary approach to forging bipartisan compromise.” It has long stood as a model for the rest of the nation.

And so, I was encouraged to hear that Lankford and Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., were on the verge of releasing a landmark bill that would begin to unravel the mess at the southern border.

But that didn’t last long. The conservative wing of Lankford’s own party quickly turned on him, even though the contents of the deal have yet to be made public.

The right wing of the party has refused to continue funding Ukraine’s desperate struggle to repel Russian invaders — a struggle that once would have resonated with the party’s core anti-tyranny platform — until a deal is reached on border issues. Lankford now thinks that’s just a ruse.

“It is interesting, Republicans, four months ago, would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy,” he told Fox News Sunday last weekend. “So we actually locked arms together and said, ‘We’re not going to give money for this. We want a change in law.’

“And now, it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because (it’s a) presidential election year.’”

Lankford has been playing whack-a-mole with all the internet rumors that have arisen about the bill. Chief among these has been the notion, which Lankford calls “absolutely absurd,” that the agreement would allow 5,000 people a day to cross the border illegally.

Instead, he said, a daily total of 5,000 would close the border and many of them would not be allowed to stay.

But facts don’t seem to matter much in this frenzy. Even the text of the bill, when released, might not help. Republicans in Oklahoma have already voted to censure Lankford — something the party’s executive director said was done in an illegitimate meeting.

This for a conservative senator who walked away from border discussions in 2018 because some progressive ideas were gaining traction.

The border crisis is bad enough, but the lack of support for Ukraine and Israel is appalling. On a practical level, anything that gives aid and comfort to Russia or Iran could put the United States one step closer to having to deal with the mischief of dictators closer to its own borders.

Back at the 10th anniversary of the Utah Compact, the Deseret News lamented, “It is frustrating that even the rare attempt at bipartisan compromise is derailed in the miasma of ideological warfare over whether reform measures can be perceived as ‘too lenient.’”

Or in this case, because it might give the president something positive to tout during an election year, regardless of the consequences to world events.

As Oklahoma’s other Republican senator, Markwayne Mullin, put it, “The perception is already out there, and you have a lot of people up for reelection. And the perception of the American people is that (the bill is) bad. So it’s really hard to get ahead of that.”

That beast is starting to growl now. I don’t know if I can calm it down.